A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

It seemed unavoidable that I now wanted my writing not to advance an institutional body of knowledge, as is the case with a dissertation, but instead to invent an exit route, to make something out of nothing, to prop up a landmark for a place that was nowhere and everywhere.

I had been overtaken by new ambitions, a more consuming kind of hunger—a hunger for another way of being in the world.

an almost invisible sentence that sounded to us like the rallying cry of our generation: “Write poems, eat ass, & dismantle private property.”

Do you know what you’re saying to me? That my suffering is an economic privilege? What a brutal worldview, I said to River, that everything has a kind of exploitable value, regardless of its personal toll.

The lushness of their prose felt to me like an extension of their sexual identities. With beautiful ideas, they could reclaim their bodies from the history of language as a collective weapon.

The problem: universities are institutions inside which one could feel as if they were doing radical work when in actuality that radical work was being coopted and diminished and transformed into “diversity” and “equity” data.

Today, though, too-large vehicles were moving slowly in both directions, clogged in one of the few bridges that connected the north and south sides of the city. Here was just one example, I thought, of the many agonies of living in colonial times.

you could, as Gayatri Spivak put it, non-coercively inspire students to rearrange their desires away from neoliberal learning outcomes (the student as consumer, knowledge as commodity) and toward freedom, however partial and incomplete.

Hannah looked compassionately at me, as she had done many times before, a compassion that seemed to acknowledge that we were situated inside a structure that depleted more than it enlivened.

I’m two years away from a defense; the thought of remaining a student with funding that is barely livable and a life that seems like a worse version of Barthes’s “solitude with regular interruptions”—because the regular interruptions have been racism and bureaucratic violence—is unbearable.

I remember, for example, one session in which Hannah led us into the river valley to write little poems for and with the trees in the style of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. The point was to make use of a writing practice that was in concert with the earth, that wasn’t about the singular “I” we’d been elsewhere instructed to pledge allegiance to the way one does a nation. She was teaching us to be citizens of the air and water and sunlight. Afterward, I felt that I inhabited my body differently, and that this was the kind of pedagogy and intellectual culture I ached for, but later I was once more engulfed by sadness at the realization I hadn’t encountered it until that moment. This experience, it turned out, would be devastatingly rare.

I write because I’ve read and been moved into a position of wonder. I write because I’ve loved and been loved. I want to find out what “we” or “us” I can walk into or build a roof over. To hold hands with others, really. To be less alone.

She was of the perspective that one could occupy the center and bring the margin into its folds, to remake from within. But that had always seemed like an incitement for disaster to me. I had been born into a so-called margin; to me and my kin it was always-already the center, one among many.

What I wanted from sex I wanted from writing: to be more fully inside my body without encumbrance, to experience embodiment as something other than a catch-22.

was in the world, restless. The world was around me, cacophonous, fluttering. Everything I wrote seemed comparatively noiseless, unalive.

I decided to reread James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room to try to relive the awe I felt when I first read it; I’d written for hours after putting the book down. This time I was struck anew by Giovanni’s assertion that homesickness is captivating only insofar as “home” is out of reach. The distance allows it to be imbued with inflated nostalgia. To return is to risk watching it explode.

On November 15, 1977, Barthes wrote this in his Mourning Diary: “I am either lacerated or ill at ease / and occasionally subject to gusts of life.” My hypothesis on the morning of August 6 was this: a novel is a gust of life from another world.

But what if the act of writing a novel, I wondered, enabled one to practice a way of life that negated the brutalities of race, gender, hetero- and homonormativity, capital and property? Rather than change the world, a novel could index a longing for something else, for a different arrangement of bodies, feelings, and environments, one in which human flourishing wasn’t inhibited for the marginalized, which seemed as urgent an act of rebellion as any.

an immediate insurgency against those whose disregard for the livability of the oppressed amounted to a politics of socially engineered mass death.

I wanted to examine how we live under conditions of duress, both visible and invisible. My novel, then, would be a kind of literary ethnography of sadness and hope, of constraint and possibility.

At the close of one century and the start of another, those from whom I descend signed a treaty near the shores of the lake around which many reserves are now located, including my own. They signed in the spirit of communality and peace and in the name of future generations, though what followed was an era defined by a systematic assault on Indigenous livability: death schools, open-air prisons, child abductions. Many sick experiments were carried out by the federal government and its henchmen from which we’re still recovering; though recovery isn’t always an option.

What I knew about being queer and Indigenous and in my twenties was desperation. It is we who experience aliveness as both inescapable and a shimmering impossibility. We improvise life outside the frame of futurity while also being ensnared by it. We don’t die. We proliferate life as if machines engineered to do so; that’s it. I would return to my hometown and go about the practice of not dying, I thought. My liveliness would be artful.

Death itself wasn’t nearly as devastating as what the human drive to stay alive causes us to accumulate over time. We endure with quaking certainty; the world devastates us without end and still we are hungry and hungrier. What dazzling logic.

There were swaths of forest around the reserves and farmers’ fields in between, especially so around my hometown. Nothing was inextricable from the trauma of the twentieth century, everything was bound up in colonial policy, in the processes of racialization and settlement, yet the topography was gorgeous, yet my people were still so full of life. I was a product of this paradox, and I had returned to study it.

So often the creative impulse is an impulse to build something that, in the end, its maker can’t destroy, something that outgrows intention.

Now the resource extraction industry was something of a last hope for many northern Albertans. This fact made me want to write another book about how under capitalism to live and work is to be against the population of which you’re a part.

She stood in the pitch-black, her feet swallowed by snow, gripping the landline, praying Jack would be arrested peacefully. She was that hopeless—it wasn’t a matter of what was horrible and what wasn’t anymore. There were degrees of horror, and she learned to cope with and to live inside some of them.

Growing up, Mary and her siblings and cousins weren’t afraid of imaginary monsters. Everywhere lurked the more realistic threat of white men whom they feared would snatch them away from their families and put them in one of the residential schools along the lake, or worse.

Sometimes she blamed the irony that those closest to you slip into blind spots inside of which they can realize an entire life.

People like us are born with an existential debt, one we remain unfree to, I wanted to say, but the truth threatened to demolish us both with its brutal simplicity. Clarity wounds. Clarity intrudes.

I thought about something Ocean Vuong has articulated, which is that the hunted convert violence into a mundanity, into background noise. It becomes, against our will, but as a matter of survival, something as evident but suppressible as the presence of light.

He had to do alone one of the unavoidable demands our humanness makes of us: submit to the indeterminacy of our feelings, allow them to govern us, however terrifying it is to do so.

Without warning, Michael said, the boy disappeared. Rumor had it his parents sent him to a conversion therapy camp a few hours away. People didn’t say “gay,” Michael added, afraid it was contagious, that it would sit in the air. Michael waited for him. He waited as if he were put on earth to wait. When the boy finally came back, weeks later, he was no longer a person but an outline of one, no longer flush with humanity. Michael would knock at his door and no one would answer. One evening he pounded on the door until he heard sirens in the distance, until all of him turned red and blue. Days later the boy enrolled in a high school on the other end of town, so Michael moved on. It was all he knew how to do, he said. He was still someone’s child, and children didn’t get to plunge into their solitude. Unless they did. The boy killed himself that winter. That’s what Michael heard. At the funeral he wept and wept in the church bathroom. The truth of his death was lost in a place outside admission. He wept until he was no longer human. Like an animal, he wanted his mourning to be an enormous display. People were crying, and he was simply one of them. No one knew there was a specificity to his anguish.

The generations that preceded his were socialized to believe homosexuality was a crime. It was only removed from Albertan criminal law two years after he was born, in fact. The sentiment didn’t magically vanquish when reform happened. Heterosexuality was where identity began and ended. So much so that when the AIDS epidemic ravaged gay communities all over the world, the town caught only bits and pieces of the circumstances. What made its way out here, north of the last major city, was enough to piece together an intoxicating myth of gay impurity. To be gay was to be dead or dying. Worse, to harbor the ability to kill.

Love, he realized, can be oppressive simply because it illuminates everything one has turned their back on.

As they were finalizing the divorce, she finally admitted she realized he wasn’t strictly heterosexual and, because of this, worried she would never last as the primary recipient of his sexual attention. She caught his eyes darting at men, which was automatic by then, a habit. It fucked her up. Burrowing into him on the couch, something they’d done innumerable times, became unbearable, Sara confessed to him. Something that hadn’t happened, something that existed solely as potential, this was what ended their short marriage.

Repression comes as naturally to some as breathing, I reminded myself. Indeed, much of my adolescence was spent estimating how much or little of myself I would have to render invisible in order not to gravely expose my otherness.

the misery machine called life under white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.

I too desperately believed that if anything would save two Cree boys from the throes of a world that wasn’t built for them it would be love and little else.

the campground she’d been staying at with her husband for the last week (a ritual of theirs that had to do with a performance of leisure and relaxation as middle-class ideals and therefore chores).

This was the power parents held over us, that of shaping the kinds of debt we carried into our own adulthoods.

This was what I suppose the writer Maggie Nelson means by the “democratization of the maternal function,” a more egalitarian distribution of the labor of caretaking, less a gendered burden and more so a collective undertaking that is reciprocal. We are both caring and cared for.

we don’t have to be the bearers of a family’s pessimism.

The only time I felt overwhelmed was when you were figuring out your sexuality, she added tentatively. We laughed awkwardly. That was a weird time for everyone, yes, I said. I watched my face redden in the rearview mirror. I didn’t want to impose, nor did I want to wholly ignore it, Donna continued. All I knew was that I had to love you unconditionally. I hope I did good. You did better than anyone else could’ve, I said. I don’t think I can thank you enough for that.

HERE UNFOLDED CRIMES AGAINST INDIGENOUS CHILDREN IN THE NAME OF THE NATION. HERE IS THE UNSTABLE GROUND OF TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY HAPPINESS AND MISERY.

What was also clear was that this kind of defense of property, even that which didn’t legally belong to anyone, was bound up with the larger culture of amnesia that made it so a white woman could come upon a Cree man standing in front of what’s left of a residential school and think she was in danger.

Was I evading the law? No, because I hadn’t committed a crime. Yes, because the law in this country has always functioned as a suppresser of Indigenous life. To be Cree and alive, one had, in both minor and major ways, to evade the law, to stay out of its crosshairs. This woman wanted to make me into a moving target. The history that obscured the terror of the abandoned school was the same history that deputized her, that imbued her with a degree of legal power I didn’t have, nor could I ever attain it if I wanted to. I didn’t want to live like a weapon.

believe there’s a story here, about how people are made to participate in the production of their own misery.

Can one write like a community? Where the narrative voice isn’t individual but plural? Is this the first-person plural?

Mark was a large straight white man whose family literally helped settle this region. And yet here he was decrying the end of some era of Albertan dominance or whatever. It’s fucked up.